CFR Part 52 license (the first one to get it) https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part052/f...,
UK GDA license (of a variant) https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-...
Let's check!
Hitachi Nuclear, hard hit by the reactor shutdown in Japan following Fukushima, canceled projects, even in Europe (inherited through the acquisition of Horizon Nuclear Power) and even their R&D for Generation 3 (ABWR).
Their overall move is moving them away from the energy sector (abandoning their wind turbine division in 2020).
The deal with GE ("GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy") dates back to 2007 and has produced nothing to date: these large industrial companies (inertia...) with very different and poorly complementary cultures have not worked together, and none will be permanently based on the soil of their first customer (Canada).
The combination of their resources and weak hopes will accentuate the difficulty of orchestrating a large two-headed project: Areva NP (French+German), worse.
The BWRX design is truly innovative and very recent; no examples exist.
Specification adjustments demanded on the fly by the safety authority will likely rain down, delaying and increasing the cost of the project.
The client will be sensitive to this, having already suffered this (at Darlington, the host plant itself) and is experienced (Darlington has been in operation for 30 years).
The customer is strict (their nuclear power is renowned for its good performance), well-positioned to benefit from the advice of US and French safety agencies (whose relevant institutes are interested in SMRs), and perhaps a little bitter about not being able to deploy their national CANDU.
This SMR model has been optimized to be low-cost (series effect), which could (the magnitude of the side effects of certain modifications) make it difficult to adapt despite its modularity.
I see a recipe for disaster likely to make the 4 EPR projects and Vogtle look like resounding successes.
https://youtu.be/CXVHRkd3byg?si=-wqRibYVIOb-E75f
And the fuel flexibility of the CANDU brings all this back to the waste reprocessing original topic too!
This view is much easier to defend than the one in favor of new reactor designs. However, the fundamental debate is about renewables vs. nuclear, and factually, nuclear, even in a nation with good uranium deposits + good track record + design safer than most other ones... is increasingly difficult to defend.
> don't modernize it too much
The price to pay for this is high because it means giving up on trying to resolve some of the problems of nuclear power (risk of accidents, dependence on uranium, waste, proliferation of weapons, etc.).
> it might still be cheap
Projects over the past two decades show that even projects with improved old reactor designs (rather than radically new concepts) fail.
> Decouple Pod
It seems to me that he misses some key points, for example won't such an underground setup be way more difficult to inspect and even more to maintain/repair? Long-term waste repositories projects are way less demanding and their costs are exploding.